“I am,” Jefferson said. He was glassy-eyed. “Christ…I hope this does what you say it will.”
Foggy Winslett nodded.
“Yes,” Derryman said.
Ethan looked at Olivia. “Are you ready?”
She stared down at Dave and then she lifted her weary, shocked eyes to his. “Will…everyone who died…will they be alive again?”
“That’s the plan,” he answered.
“Vincent,” she said, “and Dave too. All of them.” The tears crept down her cheeks. “Oh, my God.”
“I’m going to finish this.” He sensed activity beyond the steel door. “Goodbye, Olivia,” he said, and he wanted to hug her and thank her for all she had done but the river of time was moving. He quickly reached out to the cube in Jefferson’s hand to input the final code.
He had entered seven digits when the enemy came.
Before Ethan could react, two Cypher energy spheres tore into the room through the door. One hit Derryman in its passage, blasting away most of the upper part of his body. Derryman’s legs and lower torso staggered and the single remaining arm reached around as if searching for its missing parts, the rags of its suit jacket on fire. The next two spheres blew the mangled door inward along with much of the wall. The slab of steel and chunks of broken concrete edged with fire hurtled into the room. A shockwave took everyone off their feet and the sheet of plateglass shattered. Jefferson went down as a fist-sized piece of concrete broke his collarbone on the right side. The cube fell to a floor that was suddenly littered with flaming debris.
Ethan was on his knees. Blood streamed from a gash above his left eye, and a small fragment of concrete had scorched a streak across his left cheek. His broken arm had come out of its sling and hung uselessly. The pain that thrummed through him was nearly paralyzing. He was stunned, just on the edge of losing consciousness. He made out a figure striding through the ragged opening: a single Cypher soldier, its blaster ready for another burst of double fire. He recognized the small red glyph of an honored killing machine etched on the lower right slope of the faceplate; this was the soldier that had executed Bennett Jackson.
Deathbringer’s circuits worked. The soldier was aware of its primary target ahead and slightly to the left, in a posture of helplessness though that was deceiving. But there was something else of importance here; it gave off an electrical vibration Deathbringer had never before experienced. This object was shaped like a cube and was lying near the primary target. The object bore two illuminated squares. In an instant Deathbringer’s schematics identified this object as an unknown threat to be destroyed, and the Cypher soldier altered the aim of its blaster to burn this cube into melted ruin.
A piece of concrete hit Deathbringer’s faceplate and caused a second’s disruption.
“No,” the President gasped from where he’d pulled himself up from the rubble, half of his face a mask of blood. Ethan felt something else enter the room. It was behind him. It was cold, deadly, and unspeakable.
The Cypher soldier felt it too and swiveled to take aim with its energy weapon, but before that could happen a spear of liquid was already in the air and had passed over the peacekeeper.
Deathbringer began to vibrate out. It was quick, but this time it was not quick enough. The liquid splattered across its faceplate and instantly started burning through it. The vibration ceased; the Cypher ghosted back in, and as the acid melted through the faceplate material and destroyed the underlying schematics and life directives, the soldier’s body began to writhe and twist as if to tear itself to pieces. The blaster fired as the trigger finger convulsed. A pair of burning spheres shot between Ethan and Jefferson and smashed into the operating room’s equipment. The soldier twisted in two directions as if upper and lower parts of its body were coming unscrewed in the middle. The energy weapon fired again, and the spheres tore through the wall behind Olivia, who clung to the floor and to the tattered remnants of her sanity.
As Deathbringer spun and convulsed and the acid ate its lifeforce away, Ethan turned his head and caught sight of what stood behind him.
It was only a brief glimpse before it changed into the image of a human woman with long, lank brown hair and sad eyes in a face that used to be pretty. She wore jeans and a white blouse edged with pink around the collar. An instant before the illusion was created, the creature had been a nightmare thing whose scaly yellow flesh was banded with black and red. It had worn a shapeless, leathery black gown, and the scarlet pupils of the unblinking eyes were both repulsive and hypnotic.
The sad-eyed woman spoke.
“My Jefferson,” she said, with a Southern accent. “Betrayed his lover. Such a bad boy.”
Jefferson saw Regina standing there, but he knew what this really was and so did the peacekeeper. A pulsing pain began at the back of Jefferson’s neck; in another heartbeat it had grown to a force that squeezed the tears of agony from his swollen eyes. He thought it was about to blow his head off.
“You,” said the Gorgon queen. Her gaze shifted to Ethan. “Caused us concern. What are you?”
Ethan was barely able to answer. There was blood in his mouth, his lungs were hitching for breath and this body was all but done.
“Not your toy,” he managed to whisper. “Your master.”
She smiled faintly and with great contempt.
But her smile faltered when four more Cypher soldiers came through the broken wall, and the peacekeeper knew it was his moment.
The cube was within reach. There were three digits of the binary code to enter: three zeroes. The illuminated squares were on top of the cube; they were always on top, no matter how the cube lay.
He reached out and was able to enter two zeroes before the queen realized that what he was doing was a threat. The face rippled, and the mask fell away like a shimmering mirage. Revealed there was the hideous, cobra-like visage that could freeze the heart of any human, and as Jefferson Jericho’s head pulsed toward explosion and the Cypher soldiers aimed their energy weapons, the queen of the Gorgons hissed a stream of acid from her fanged mouth, flying at the face of the boy who defied her.
The peacekeeper entered the final digit as acid splattered across the forehead, nose and into the silver eyes.
He saw the squares turn red before his eyes were burned out.
He burst free from the ruined body, a being of total energy like a writhing electrical storm that shot out bolts of lightning in all directions and grew larger to fill the room, the level, the entire installation, the sky from horizon to horizon, and to envelop the entirety of the embattled planet Earth.
The walls of reality warped.
Holes began to break through the construction that separated the Present and the Past. Olivia had the sensation of her body no longer on the floor of this destroyed room. It seemed to her that her body had not moved, but the room itself had suddenly fallen away. She was drifting in a twilight world where unrecognizable shapes and images rushed past her, and their motion caused her to spin as if all gravity had ceased to exist. She was on a Tilt-A-Whirl at a carnival, spinning so fast she couldn’t catch her breath, and she wanted someone to stop it…stop it please…but it didn’t stop, and she tried to cry out, but her voice was gone, everything had become a gray blur, and all sounds were muffled thunder.
She spun and spun and spun, and she thought she would sue someone when this was over, she would sue the owners and Vincent would help her, because nobody could stand this, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak, it wasn’t right that someone didn’t stop this, no human could bear it, and as strange and horrible pictures tumbled through her mind she feared for her sanity, and she thought in panic God help me I’m coming apart…